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Real news about fake news: Tech investors set their sights on the misinformation crisis

АвторLaura Hazard Owen

Jun 02
в Fact-checking and verification

The growing stream of reporting on and data about fake news, misinformation, partisan content, and news literacy is hard to keep up with. This weekly roundup offers the highlights of what you might have missed.

Fake news becomes an investor issue.Impact investors and Facebook shareholders Arjuna Capital and Baldwin Brothers want the company to do more about fake news and raised the issue at the annual meeting Thursday. (They’ll bring up the same with Google next week.) “Both [Facebook and Google] prefer to see themselves as neutral technology platforms but they have been transformed into media platforms — that is why we are so concerned,” Arjuna’s Natasha Lamb told the Financial Times’ Hannah Kuchler. The FT story also mentions a research report on fake news from the investor firm Sustainalytics; the full report is here and claims that “only 16 percent of researched media firms, including Sky, ITV, Vivendi, Thomson Reuters and RTL Group, are well-prepared to manage relevant content governance risks,” i.e. “measures to ensure the integrity of information created or distributed by media companies.”

“You’ve Been Pranked! Now Create A Story & Trick Your Friends!” BuzzFeed’s Craig Silverman and Sara Sparyinvestigate U.S.-based sites that invite readers to create their own fake news stories and share them on Facebook.

Using domain registration records, BuzzFeed News identified two separate networks that together own at least 30 nearly identical “prank” news sites and that published more than 3,000 fake articles in six languages over the past 12 months. They’re also generating significant engagement on Facebook: The sites collectively earned more than 13 million shares, reactions, and comments on the social network in the last 12 months.

“The Mosses don’t think anyone in their community would fall for the imposter site.” The 105-year-old weekly Normangee Star, run out of Normangee, Texas, can be found at normangeestar.com. Make sure you don’t go to normangeestar.net, a fake news site run out of Ukraine. The Star’s real-life owners told The Dallas Morning News’ Charles Scudder that they aren’t particularly concerned about the imposter site (though one of its stories did result in them having to deal with the Canadian embassy’s request for a correction): “The readers of the real Normangee Star know the paper doesn’t cover national or international news digitally.”

Bat-men on the moon. I’m not a huge fan of the “there’s always been fake news” stories (and similarly dislike “the biggest disruptor of all time was the printing press!”) but I do very much like the 1835 art in this Economist column. “Giant man-bats that spent their days collecting fruit and holding animated conversations; goat-like creatures with blue skin; a temple made of polished sapphire.”